Zell via Wikimedia Commons under CC By-SA 3.0 The mineral cinnabar forms in volcanic regions worldwide. Nearly neon, the candy-apple red “has attracted people to the use of this toxic substance since very early time periods,” says Young, who studies cinnabar use in the ancient Andes but was not involved with the new study. “It creates this very vibrant color that doesn’t exist in other kinds of minerals,” says Vanderbilt University archaeologist Michelle Young. In volcanic regions, cinnabar forms from a union of mercury and sulfur when near-boiling fluids flow through rock cracks. The Valencina community’s newly measured, staggeringly high mercury values underscore just how socially or spiritually precious this blazing red rock was for some communities. “But the truth is, the history of the relationship of humans with mercury has been quite complex.” The people of Valencina and other societies worldwide, spanning from at least 10,000 years ago to the present day, have used mercury-rich cinnabar for beauty, magic and traditional medicine-risk of debilitation or death be damned. 1,” says Leonardo García Sanjuán, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “Western medicine has basically banned mercury … public health enemy No. And then anyone who inhaled powder or vapors with mercury may have suffered pneumonitis, or inflamed lungs. Both stillness and smooth movement would have been hampered by tremors, twitches and balance issues. They would have experienced memory lapses, fatigue and possible kidney failure. “One would expect significant symptoms,” says Leikin, who was not involved with the research but has collaborated with archaeologists to consider mercury in ancient humans from other regions.Īs sufferers of acrodynia-the medical term for chronic mercury poisoning-the Valencina people might have their lost hair and developed rashes, Leikin says. He usually sees exposures presented as nanograms of mercury per gram of tissue, but the Valencina results report micrograms per gram-1,000 times as large. “These are enormous levels,” says Jerrold Leikin, a physician and toxic metals expert at the University of Illinois Chicago. More community members consumed it accidentally, while working with the pigment or through environmental contamination, according to a study published this past November in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. It seems at this Copper Age site called Valencina, between about 29 B.C.E., ritual leaders intentionally ingested mercury-rich cinnabar for ceremonies or magic. Millennia later, archaeologists measured mercury in the bones of these women and others from their community, revealing values orders of magnitude higher than what health experts consider tolerable today. On this mind-altering trip, the women may have liaised with deities and divined their society’s future-unaware that the powder’s potency came from its main elemental component: the toxic metal mercury.Īs they repeated these rites throughout their lives, the poison built up in their bodily tissues. Ground from a mineral called cinnabar, the substance would have sent them into a fevered trance with tremors and delirium. Then they inhaled the particles, or maybe downed them mixed in an elixir. Perhaps before a crowd, pulsing to chants and drumbeats, these oracle-like figures hunched over a heap of radiant red powder. Five thousand years ago, in what’s now southern Spain, a special set of women donned their ceremonial gowns, bedecked with tens of thousands of beads crafted from shell, ivory and amber.
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